when no one is looking

a reflection on perception, performance, and the quiet disintegration of self in the absence of an observer

i have never been just one person. none of us have. we refract like light, bending at each surface, reshaping with each new frame. sometimes i am generous. sometimes quiet. sometimes flinching before i know why. what people call personality might just be posture. a choreography that emerges in relation. alone, i like to believe i am unfiltered. unperformed. but even in solitude i notice the way i pace differently when no one is home. the way i rehearse things i might say. the way i fold silence like it’s being overheard.

we speak of the self as if it’s a core. as if beneath all the adapting there is something fixed. something original. but even in physics, nothing exists without context. a particle does not carry properties like souvenirs. its values emerge in measurement. spin, momentum, charge, these are not intrinsic. they arise in relation to the system that touches it. to know is to disturb. to observe is to interfere. there is no such thing as a neutral look. perception collapses what was once potential into form. what is seen is changed by the seeing. this is the observer effect, and it is not metaphor. it is the way matter behaves. and sometimes, i think it is the way we behave too.

there is no such thing as being truly seen without being shaped. we become legible only by being simplified. by being rendered in someone else’s frame. the parts that do not translate fall out of view. not erased, just ignored. the rest sharpened into clarity. and what remains is not false. just not whole. i am not the same to everyone. i am not even the same to myself. who i become in your eyes is different from who i am in hers. the physics of being perceived.

perception is a form of violence because it forces resolution. the body cannot remain indefinite when looked at. uncertainty collapses. options narrow. the self, like a particle, is pinned into one possibility. thomas nagel once wrote that there is no reason to believe our subjective experience is privileged, that the way we see the world is anything more than a useful fiction. but what happens when others see us differently than we see ourselves? who wins? whose fiction becomes real?

even relationships are measurement devices. not always by choice. just by structure. a long friendship changes you. not only because of what you share but because of how you’re seen over time. because of the consistency of that lens. you begin to internalise the gaze. you predict it. mirror it. and when it shifts, when they stop looking, something inside you goes fuzzy again. decoheres.

i think about this when someone says “just be yourself.” as if there’s one self to return to. as if we don’t adjust with every shift in the room. even mirrors lie, depending on the light. even memory reshapes, depending on the frame. neuroscience tells us that the brain constructs the present retroactively, that what we experience as now is already a reconstruction. a guess. delayed and assembled in post-processing. the self is not a recording. it is an edit. and the editor is whoever’s watching.

does that make us fake? i don’t think so. maybe it makes us relational. porous. more like fields than things. more like tone than content. my voice changes depending on who hears it. yours probably does too. it makes it responsive. like everything in nature. when a tree bends toward light we do not call it a performance. we call it growth.

in buddhist philosophy, the doctrine of anattā holds that there is no permanent, unchanging self. that identity is a bundle of conditions, ever in flux. and yet we resist this. we are desperate to be known. to be seen accurately. fully. but full observation is a collapse. full exposure flattens. the only way to remain whole is to remain partially hidden. the self survives in the shadow not in the light. susan sontag said that to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. maybe that’s true of attention too. maybe to see something is to claim it. maybe this is why it feels so intimate. and why we recoil when it’s the wrong gaze. not all observation makes us real. some just distort. others wound. but when it’s right, when it’s steady and soft and wide enough to hold contradiction, maybe we become something more coherent. not because we’ve been decoded. but because we’ve been allowed to exist without resolution.

i used to think that being known would save me. now i think that being understood might not be the goal at all. maybe the goal is to remain partially unknowable. to resist full legibility. to stay a little blurry in the corners. because we are still in motion. there is no fixed version of me waiting to be found. there is only this system, in flux, in contact, collapsing and reforming in the presence of others. and when no one is looking, maybe i don’t disappear. maybe i just return to that suspended state, not less real, just less resolved. a self not defined by observation, but by the quiet freedom of possibility.